Hooverville: 500-word Flash Fiction

Neon Green Shorts (Cultural Comedy) 🏆

Germany is just too cold.

That's a fact. At least for Florian Brinkhof it is.

Winter and autumn (and maybe even spring) in Germany means you have to bundle yourself up, breathe dry, stuffy heated air and bear the pong of wet, unwashed coats that pervades the 7:39 bus to work every morning. The sky is nothing but a flat sheet of unchanging melancholy and the unrelenting rain just as hard as the expressions on the faces of passers-by.

Brrrrrrr.

Florian adores the summer.

The first week of January will see him planning his vacation in August. His workstation is plastered with postcards from popular vacation spots in hot, exotic countries. On his computer is a photo parade of tropical beaches he's programmed to run every ten minutes, regardless of what he's working on. And his absolute favourite item of clothing is a lurid pair of neon green shorts that make his legs look like two doughy unbaked baguettes.

He can't wait to put them on.

And he does do, every year once the temperatures climb over 16 degrees and the frigid wind stops ripping leaves from the trees. 

And that's how it is this year.

The digital weather station on Florian's window tells him one morning in late May that the outside temperature has reached 16.7 C. 

That's his signal to reach into the closet for his beloved, unflattering shorts.

He's momentarily delayed deciding which T-shirt goes best with them, but in the end, he leaves home sporting a sherbet orange-neon green combo. Smurf blue trainers adorn his feet. In that outfit, he feels so internally Jamaican, he might as well be wearing dreadlocks.

He isn't, but what does it matter. Summer's here! The sun is shining and the gelaterias and beer gardens have reopened their outdoor seating. 

It's time to be alive again! Forget the cold and the rain! Summer!

Florian bounces onto the terrace at Mario's, drops down into a chair so close to the road he could stretch out an arm and touch the traffic. He orders beer and a 4-scoop bowl of ice cream, disregarding the discreet eye roll from the Italian waiter.

Twenty minutes later, Florian is shivering like a snowman from the ice cream and the shadows cast by nearby buildings, but he refuses to budge. It's summer! He's wearing his shorts!

He flags down the waiter and orders another beer. 

Two months on, Florian will be on a regional train, sweating profusely in his neon green shorts and peeling his thighs intermittently off vinyl seating as the blazing sun broils him where he sits.

It's over 30 C in Germany and he thinks he's going to die before they get to the lake town where there's a small beach he hopes will offer some relief from the heat.

A breeze. A lukewarm handful of water. 

Anything.

He wipes a trickle of perspiration from his temple and closes his eyes.

Germany is just too hot. He can't wait for his vacation to southern Spain.

Where it's nothing like Germany at all.    

(A/n: The joke here is that Germans idealise the summer warmth in other places, but complain bitterly when it gets just as hot in their own country. ) 

This won the WPFusion profile's Midsummer Madness contest June 2022.